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The Way We Blog Now

By Hugo Lindgren March 2, 2011 12:36 pmMarch 2, 2011 12:36 pm

Marvin Orellana/The New York Times

Hello? Hello!

You’re reading The 6th Floor, the new blog of The Times Magazine, launched in advance of the redesigned print edition, which is out this Sunday, March 6. The first column by The Times’s executive editor, Bill Keller, is already online, and other articles will be soon. There are a lot of new writers, departments and concepts, and we will be rolling out many more in the coming weeks. We wish we could put out 10 issues out right away, so you could see the full breadth of what we’re trying to do.

Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark for The New York TimesLori Berenson and her son, Salvador, in Lima, Peru.

Whatever it is, we promise you this -– we won’t be like the 25-year-old Twitter junkie in your life who knows everything before you do. One luxury of working under the same roof as the Times newsroom is that we don’t have to be the quickest on the draw. We can allow our curiosity to wander and see where it leads. The magazine’s primary purpose is to add depth and dimension to the news, to find the human drama that underlies breaking events and to distill it into narrative journalism.

What kind of stories are we looking for? I’ve been asked that many times since I started as editor of the magazine in October, and even after these many months on job, I still stammer and can’t think of exactly how to answer. The stories I most want to put in the magazine — and to discuss on The 6th Floor — are the ones that take me by surprise, on subjects I know little about.

I’ll give you an example from some time ago —an article by Michael Daly that appeared in the Dec. 20, 1982, issue of New York magazine. It was about a Korean family that opened a fruit market on the Upper East Side. At the time, Korean business owners were something of an oddity in Manhattan, readily stereotyped as Moonies bent on ripping off New Yorkers with underripe, overpriced tomatoes.

Daly demolished these misconceptions by telling a simple, direct story about one family’s determination to succeed, how they poured their entire lives into that store and actually destroyed their own health on behalf of customers. “It never stop,” Min Chul Shin, the proprietor, told Daly. “No time to sleep. A lot of times I have no time to eat.”

As far as I know, the article received no journalistic accolades, but it did give one 14-year-old a richer understanding of the world around him. To such an extent that I’ve never forgotten it, despite the thousands of magazine articles I’ve read since.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…